We all work in the internet security industry, and as such we're involved with a wide range of technologies, markets and people. Our collective blog is a space for our insights, observations and interests...

(N.B. The opinions expressed here are those of the individual authors, and not those of Smoothwall ltd or Smoothwall inc.)

Friday, May 15, 2015

Game of 72 Myth or Reality?

I can’t pretend that, in the mid 90s, I didn't pester my mum for a pair Adidas poppers joggers. Or that I didn't, against my better judgement, strut around in platform sneakers in an attempt to fit in with the in crowd. But emulating popular fashion was as far as I got. I don’t remember ever doing stupid or dangerous dares to impress my classmates. Initially, I thought, maybe I was just a good kid, but a quick straw poll around Smoothwall Towers, showed that my colleagues don’t recall hurting themselves or anyone else for a dare either. The closest example of a prank we could come up with between us was knock and run and egg and flour - hardly show stopping news.

But now, teenagers seem to be taking daring games to a whole new level through social media, challenging each other to do weird and even dangerous things. Like the #cinnamonchallenge on Twitter (where you dare someone to swallow a mouthful of cinnamon powder in 60 seconds without water). A quick visual check for the hashtag shows it’s still a thing today, despite initially going viral in 2013, and doctors having warned teens about the serious health implications.
Now, apparently there’s another craze doing the rounds. #Gameof72 dares teens to go missing for 72 hours without contacting their parents. The first suspected case was reported in a local French newspaper in April, when a French studentdisappeared for three days and later told police she had been doing Game of 72. Then, in a separate incident, on 7 May, two schoolgirls from Essex went missing for a weekend in a suspected Game of 72 disappearance. Police later issued a statement to say the girls hadn't been playing the game.
So why then, despite small incident numbers, and the absence of any actual evidence that Game of 72 is real, are parents and the authorities so panicked? Tricia Bailey from the Missing Children’s Society warned kids of the “immense and terrifying challenges they will face away from home.” And Stephen Fields, a communications coordinator at Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board said, “it’s not cool”, and has warned students who participate that they could face suspension.
It’s completely feasible that Game of 72 is actually a myth, created by a school kid with the intention of worrying the adults. And it’s worked; social media has made it seem even worse, when in reality, it’s probably not going to become an issue. I guess the truth is, we’ll probably never know, unless a savvy web filtering company finds a way of making these twitter-mobile games trackable at school, where peer pressure is often at its worst.
Wait a minute...we already do that. Smoothwall allows school admins to block specific words and phrases including, Twitter hashtags. Say for instance that students were discussing Game of 72, or any other challenge, by tweet, and that phrase had been added to the list of banned words or phrases; the school’s administrator would be alerted, and their parents could be notified. Sure it won’t stop kids getting involved in online challenges, because they could take it to direct message and we’d lose the conversation. But, I think you’ll probably agree, the ability to track what students are saying in tweets is definitely a step in the right direction.